The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman: review

Emma Hogan delights in The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman.

4

Ned Beauman

By Emma Hogan

7:00AM BST 06 Aug 2012

Egon Loeser, the sex-starved German stage designer at the heart of this strange and brilliant novel by Ned Beauman, is obsessed with two things. The first is a girl, inauspiciously called Adele Hitler, who he meets in Thirties Berlin, where the book begins. The second is Adriano Lavincini, a late Renaissance Venetian stage-designer who, in 1677, caused part of a Parisian theatre to collapse with his teleportation device – the accident referred to in the title.

Loeser follows Adele from Berlin to Paris and Los Angeles, in the hope that she will eventually sleep with him. On the way, he meets a cast of eccentrics: a caddish Brit, Rupert Rackenham, who seduces Adele and steals the Lavincini story for his novel (and who writes for The Daily Telegraph); a physics professor trying to build his own teleportation device; an Angeleno bookseller who collects science fiction by H P Lovecraft and a con-man in Paris who tries to pass off his own work as an undiscovered novel by F Scott Fitzgerald.

Beauman, whose first novel Boxer, Beetle (2010) interwove the stories of a modern-day collector of Nazi memorabilia with that of a homosexual Jewish boxer in the 1930s, is blisteringly funny, witty and erudite. A series of dazzling metaphors and similes pinpoint an experience exactly: the physics professor, for example, “had that odd conversational manner of some scientists… that is so doggedly awkward that it sometimes seems to verge upon flirtation”. Only once or twice does this style, and off-beam subject matter, strain slightly. For the most part, however, Beauman manages to combine the intrigue of a thriller with the imagery of a comedy. It makes for an excellent read.